Track 22

Unit 12

Sociology

Marriage

Pages 116 and 117

Listen for main ideas and listen for details

So my first question to you today is how would you define marriage? Well, many people might say something like, it’s a union of two or more people who are legally recognize by the government. Or, it’s a couple that live together and has and raises children. Sound good?

Both of these ideas are true in many but not all cultures. Actually most anthropologists including myself agree that there is no single definition that adequately describes all of the types of marriages found throughout the world. But whatever the definition, some form of marriage is found in every society and I’d say that marriage serves an extremely important function in society.

So, let’s first look at some of the benefits of marriage to society. Now, a universal benefit of marriage is that it creates relationships or alliances among families. Now some anthropologists believe that this is the main reason why marriage developed in human society. This idea are summed up in what is known as the alliance theory which simply says that marriage increases social cooperation through the relations that develop between people and their in-laws. And this kind of human network is intern good for society as a whole.

A second benefit of marriage concerns children. Compared with animals, humans take an extremely long time to mature from infancy until adulthood when they become independent. Because of this, children need parents to care for them for the first few years of their lives. Then marriage increases the likelihood that a child will be properly cared for and that the child will receive the support and protection of both parents over a long period of time. Obviously, this is quite important to the survival and development of a society.

Now, children also play a role in the third and final benefit we’ll discuss. You see, in most cultures, marriage establishes the legitimacy and rights of a child because it establishes who the child’s father is. Now this is known as the legitimacy argument. Which says that in order for a child to be recognized and respected by the community, the child must be linked to a father who is legitimately married to the child’s mother. This is particularly true in most modern societies where there is a strong pressure for couples to get married after woman becomes pregnant. However, I might add that this kind of pressure is lessening in some Western countries.

Alright, so I hope that we agree that marriage benefit society in many ways. Next, I’d like to consider who marries whom and why. Any guesses? Well, statistics clearly show that most people marry someone similar to themselves in terms of race, level of education, social class and interests. This social phenomenon is called homogeny. For instance, more than 90% of Americans marry someone from their own racial group and about 75% marry someone from their same social class.

Now, why is the phenomenon of homogeny, so prevalent? Well, there is a very logical reason. People tend to marry people they’ve met in their daily lives and most people tend to live near and socialize with people from their own racial group their own social class and with similar levels of education. I suspect that the many married couples you know confirms that homogeny is the norm. However, recent research suggests that this trend in marriage is changing and that marriages will look different in the future.

To talk about the future of marriage I’d like to focus on some figures from the US although these ideas certainly apply to countries throughout the world. The strongest major trend that we’ll see in marriages of the future is a gradual decline in racial homogeny. In 1980, 1.3% of marriages in the US were interracial. By 2002 the number had risen to 3% and by 2005 the number of interracial marriages had risen to 7.5%. So, as you can see this trend is accelerating rapidly and we have many reasons to believe that the number of interracial marriages in the US will continue to increase for some time to come.

One reason is a rise in racial tolerance. A recent poll showed that 86% of Blacks, 79% of Hispanics and 66% of whites, would accept their children or their grandchildren marrying someone of a different race. Another reason anthropologists believe interracial marriages will become more common is related to anticipated increases in the Hispanic and Asian populations in the US.

These two groups are come for many of the interracial marriages that we now see. So as these populations grow, we can assume, so will interracial marriages. Now, I hope you’ll agree that this trend is a very welcome one. Remember that one universal characteristic of marriages that, it creates alliances. And what better way to bring down racial and nationalistic barriers than through interracial and international marriages?